Regular Article

Gearbox damage identification and quantification using stochastic resonance

Dynamics & Identification Research Group, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy

^* e-mail: clement.mba@polito.it

Received: 12 December 2016
Accepted: 6 November 2017

Abstract

Amongst the many new tools used for vibration based mechanical fault diagnosis in rotating machineries, stochastic resonance (SR) has been shown to be able to identify as well as quantify gearbox damage via numerical simulations. To validate the numerical simulation results that were obtained in a previous work by the authors, SR is applied in the present study to data from an experimental gearbox that is representative of an industrial gearbox. Both spur and helical gears are used in the gearbox setup. While the results of the direct application of SR to experimental data do not exactly corroborate the numerical simulation results, applying SR to experimental data in pre-processed form is shown to be quite effective. In addition, it is demonstrated that traditional statistical techniques used for gearbox diagnosis can be used as a reference to check how well SR performs.